


roses & hearts & knaves & tarts

by Morbane



Category: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Baking, Coda, Constructive Criticism Welcome, F/M, Fairy Tales, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 06:19:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/658869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Promises must be kept, and debts repaid; but you don't have to end a story the same way you began it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	roses & hearts & knaves & tarts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kurushi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurushi/gifts).



> For kurushi and also for Yasu (but only if pleasing thereof). Have a story while I write you another one.

I came back from the walk in the dark with Con, and it was the dawn of the first day: the first day back to a new normal. The second day, for once, of an unknown quantity: 2/x. The time I had to live was no longer measured by Bo's enmity, so counting it that way defeated the purpose.

 _Waking_ and _the world_ clicked back together again. Today was the first day, and these were the first cinnamon rolls, and this was the first ride with Mel. Even the scent of autumn air felt like something alive and new.

And these were old, old roses, hanging over my dash. I thought I might leave them there to dry, going brittle and off-white like ancient paper in the sun.

* * *

The first day of my new life; the second day since Bo; and, for my family and coffeehouse friends, the third day I'd come back under mysterious circumstances and SOF's eye. (I successfully stopped myself from imagining what _four_ might be. Following that pattern, it could only be ominous.)

But _one_ was pretty good, and _zero_ was very hopeful, and _minus one_ might be even better. Imagine what I had to look forward to in all my days to come.

This was the sort of thinking I was doing. Remember, I'd just mugged my sleep cycle in a dark alley. Almost literally. It worked very well; no one, especially Mom, had expected me to return from some major showdown with SOF acting _dreamy_. Perhaps, they thought, I'd won something. Exorcised some dark demon hold with SOF's help. Usually, when I was tired, I snarled. I didn't trance out.

* * *

But the next day was a second day, and I woke up alone in the dark, alone except for roses.

I am used to getting up in the dark. I am the queen of getting up in the dark. That and of cinnamon rolls. But... sleeping in the sunshine was something I'd needed, the day before the day before; it had brought dreams of safety. The months were creeping in on me. I'd thought, when I was poisoned, that it would kill me in the winter if Con couldn't save me; I wouldn't have enough sun to fight it off. 

I needed sun for everything, and what I needed it for now was — me. The dark self, whenever its Day One had been, whenever it had seemed to overwhelm light and leaves, to become the me that had gone into the unknown, the absolute, the apocalypse — and come out. 

_This is the first day of the rest of my life_ was a fable, a parable, a story I was telling myself.

Because: when you're scared, you have stories. You tell yourself what pattern things are part of. "I messed up this time, but that's because I'm learning. People make mistakes when they're new." "The recruiter didn't call back, but he's only the first one I've tried. You have to ask around a lot before you get a good position." "That was a harsh thing to say, but she's tired and she's worried about someone we both love; we will sort this out when we're both on an even keel."

For larger fears, you have larger stories. 

I thought of people who go into the dark and come out.

I thought of Persephone, dark in the winter and light in the spring, but I wasn't willing to give up that much: no one had kidnapped me, or tricked me into this, so why should I trick myself?

I thought of Beauty and the Beast, because I was surrounded by dying roses, and it was a story I'd already told.

Then I shook myself. I got up and put on my jeans with the embroidered diamond patterns up and down the outer seams. I put on a violently violet turtleneck, which was the sole long-sleeved survivor of my period of ripping-sleeves-off-high-necked-tops-as-a-wound-concealment-strategy, because I was rather too fond of the way the sleeves shaded to electric blue at the elbows. I tied my hair up with a gold-sparkled green scarf. Then I drove off to work, and the dawn lit me up like a prism. (The rays of the sun, prized apart.)

* * *

I made rose jam.

Then I made rose jam tarts, and let them waft into the coffeehouse; the number of regulars this summoned to the bakery door was surprisingly low, because the SOF boys weren't around today. They hadn't been around in previous days either, come to think of it. Charlie's wasn't looking so good on their expense accounts any more, or so I supposed, now that my name wasn't one they wanted to bring to anyone's attention. 

Well. So I dialled back the cranberry muffins and the cornbread, and made a second batch of tarts in spite of myself, and used it as an excuse to teach Paulie how to blind-bake pastry shells. We filled them with hazelnuts and chocolate, and we filled them with lemon and marmalade, and we filled them with pears, layered towards the centre to meet in the middle in the shape of a heart.

"Take some home," I told Paulie. "We'll be dealing with a boring glut of apples soon enough." He took the pears. I didn't think much of this choice. We'd be nearly as sick as pears by the end of autumn.

Mel came through, licked the rose jam off my fingers, and stole a hazelnut chocolate tart. 

"Knave," I said.

He grinned. "I do all right by myself."

I said, "I think I do all right for myself too," but the cockiness I was going for turned into something like perplexity.

He came over, touched my (floury) chin, sketched a line across my cheek. "Yeah, I think you are," he said, "all right. Did I have something to do with that?"

 _Yes,_ and _but_ , and _surely_. "Oh, you will," I said.

* * *

I came up the drive to the unmistakeable feeling that a vampire was at the other end of it. Waiting, politely, on my porch. I thought of staying out there with him; it wasn't a cold evening, the stars were lovely (stars that should hurt my vampire, and didn't). Like an old-fashioned belle entertaining suitors with cool drinks on her porch. Cool drinks like orange juice. Maybe not.

We went in. I inhaled deeply at the smell of roses, laid down heavy still; there was beginning to be a sourness behind it, but only a little. To my surprise, Con inhaled too, seeming to pull something from the air. "What?" I asked him. "Not the rose, but the scent of the rose? You need some kind of _essence_?"

"Not the rose, but the death of the rose," he answered me.

* * *

The next morning, the sourness was far more pronounced: the roses in my house that had been drying elegantly had a sickly look to them, and a slimy dew. I threw them out. There was only one bunch left from those last few days... before Bo, and it hung in my car. The petals crackled to the touch.

Paper, I thought, and I pulled a petal down, and I wrote on it, in spidery faint pencil letters so that the petal wouldn't fracture under the graphite tip, _life_. And I placed it on my tongue.

There were enough petals in the roses' husks for a whole story of words, but there were other roses in my future (rose day minus one, rose day minus one hundred), and the story wasn't written yet. Or so I told myself; and the rose dissolved on my tongue and faded away.


End file.
